An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped forward into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.

The problem was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tried, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d never really wanted any of it.

But Graham did want it, he still wanted all of it, it was part of his excited sense of everything that was newly possible for him. And because Frieda didn’t ask him to stop—wouldn’t have been able then to ask him to stop—he went on doing it, obliviously, happily.

Frieda, private uncomplaining Frieda, kept her suffering about this to herself until she was too angry, too wounded, to continue. It was over, she told him. It hurt, it hurt all the time.

Afterward he sometimes thought that, as much as anything, she was angry at his physical transformation. When he looks at photos of himself from college or from the early days of their marriage, he barely recognizes the tall, gawky boy captured in them. In one image he remembers with pain, he had on a shirt that could have passed for a pajama top, it was so shapeless, so hopeless, so plaid. And always those thick, dark-framed glasses. The idea that they’re now chic, that beautiful women willingly wear them, this amazes him.

The beard had been the first change. And when he grew his curly hair longer, as men were doing then, he looked like another person entirely. People responded to him differently, women especially. And in an answering response partly to that, and partly, he supposes, to all the other changes that were opening out to him in those heady days, he slowly more or less became another person—buoyant, outgoing, confident.

Frieda doesn’t look like another person, even now. She’s still the suitable mate for that old version of Graham—a tall, big-boned woman with a wide plain face and her own pair of thick, perpetually smudged glasses. He can’t see her without the tug of all those old feelings—guilt, sorrow, love.

They’re friends now, he and Frieda. They’ve had to be, for Lucas, but they both would have tried anyway, because in some sense they still love each other. Though part of what they’re loving is the sweet, serious people that they once were. That Frieda still is.

Not him. Not sweet. Certainly not serious. A joke, really.

He sips his coffee. Even this coffee makes him remorseful, this amazing cappuccino with its thick, creamy foam. He made it on the expensive espresso machine that Annie gave him last year for Christmas. Her generosity, along with the machine’s sleek perfection sitting over there on the counter—these both seem a chastisement to Graham.

He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.

Yet not entirely faithful.

Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda. Because he’s done it again.

A light thing, that’s what he’d thought at first. A fling. He’d had one other short affair much earlier on in his marriage to Annie, in a period when things were suddenly difficult between them, for reasons he didn’t feel he really understood. The earlier affair was with a woman he’d known for a while, a married woman, Linda Parkman. A friend, in their large circle of friends. He hadn’t seen it as any kind of threat to his marriage, and neither had Linda. It was a tonic, actually—and it had turned him eagerly back to Annie when it was finished. She had asked him once about his suddenly increased ardor, and he’d made some kind of joke about it.

He remembers now coming into a party in someone else’s house at around that time, looking across the room and seeing her, seeing Linda. By then, things were easily over between them. Well, relatively easily—just a mild bump or two. And she had ended it, for which Graham was grateful—it was the kind of thing it would have been difficult for him to do.

Whose party? Whose house? That was lost to history. There was always a party then, and the houses, the apartments, with their worn sofas, their secondhand chairs and lamps, their straw rugs, were pretty much all the same anyway.

So he saw her on somebody’s couch in somebody’s living room. Her face is what he recalls clearly, frowning in concentration as she listened to the woman who was speaking to the little group settled near her. Her chin was resting on her hand, one finger set sideways across her upper lip. When she looked up and saw Graham, her eyes rounded, her lips pursed, and the finger straightened out, rose vertically across her lips to touch the tip of her nose: Shhhhh.

He had felt a quick pulse of relief, of pleasure. He’d smiled at her then, and turned away.

He hadn’t gotten off scot-free, though. He’d made the mistake of talking to Frieda about it. He’d let himself think it wouldn’t matter to her, that they’d moved so far away from the grief of pulling apart that he could treat her like a confidante, a friend.

Not about this, he couldn’t. She wept. She called him a fool. She said he might as well attach reins to his penis and gallop around after it. She asked what the point of all her pain back then was, if he was still at it in his marriage to Annie. Was it all a perfect waste?

There was something about Frieda that had always made him feel protective, even though he’d been so bad at protecting her. Her awkwardness. Her earnestness.

No, he’d said to her then. No, of course not.

“What did you learn, then?” she asked shrilly. “What is it that you learned from all my suffering?”

They were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in her shotgun apartment on Whittier Street. He’d just returned Lucas after a weekend. He reached out to touch her hand across the scarred tabletop, but she pulled it back and turned sharply away, to the side. He could watch her mouth pulling into a bitter shape as she tried to keep herself from crying.

“I did, Frieda,” he said. “I learned.”

“Not enough,” she said. And for weeks, she wouldn’t talk to him.

Now he sees that she was right. This time it isn’t working the way it did before, and he feels he may have put things with Annie at risk, something he never intended.

Things with Annie: your marriage, you asshole!

The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four, maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him. Twice she’s called him at work at the bookstore in the morning, a time when he’s almost always sitting in the office, surrounded by other people. Her tone in these calls is too intimate, and this scares him. He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—at disappointing people. At being, as he sees it, unkind.

Rosemary is sort of an old friend too—more a friend of friends, actually. But he and Annie have liked her well enough—her and Charlie, her husband. In fact, they’ve probably liked Charlie better. He’s smart, affable, well-read. He designs interactive museum exhibits.

But they’re divorced now, Charlie and Rosemary. Newly divorced. Graham should have remembered the rule: you don’t fool around with the newly divorced.

They were seated next to each other at a large dinner party. He was flirting with her. Graham likes to flirt with women. He likes being courtly, flattering people, making people feel good; but especially making women feel good. Everyone knows this about him. Rosemary should have known it too. People, including Annie, make fun of him for this behavior.

He can’t even remember what he was saying, but he was, as usual, joking around. The merry grass widow. How men were going to be lined up to receive her favors.

She had looked levelly at him. She was gorgeous, he’d always thought so, but in a dramatic, almost stylized way that didn’t much interest him. Careful makeup, careful hair, lots of expensive-looking ethnic jewelry. “Well, why don’t you just jump in at the head of that line?” she said.

Thinking she was simply being flirty too, he said, “Damn straight. I’ll just push all those other guys aside.”

“Thursdays are usually best for me,” she said. “Late afternoon. I’ll expect you.”

She would?

Or was it an answering joke on her part?

He had no idea, he realized. And she turned away just after she’d said it, turned to talk to the man on her right, so he didn’t have the chance to make it part of his game, to let her know he wasn’t taking it seriously.