Not monogamy.

She went back downstairs. She gathered the scattered, mutilated pages of Memoir with Bookshop and put them back into the book, closed the cover over everything. She put the book back in the pile of other outsize books behind the couch, on top of the one with photographs of the Galapagos.

Then she lay down on the floor in front of the couch, and with the tips of her fingers, found Claire’s wooden spoon and drew it to herself.

29

Claire fell asleep in her car seat on the short trip home. Frieda, sitting next to her in the back seat, watched her fight against this, watched her repeatedly jerk her drooping head up, struggling to open her heavy eyelids over unseeing eyes . . . until finally she yielded and slumped forward, limp against the harness that held her in her chair. There was something so touching about this, about the little girl’s hopeless wish to stay awake, to stay a part of things, that Frieda felt flooded with tenderness toward her.

Lucas and Jeanne were discussing it as Lucas parked the car—the problem Claire’s conking out presented. Should they wake her to change her, to put her sleeper on? Would she resist going to sleep again if they did?

She might, they agreed. The plan then, decided upon as they climbed the stairs to Frieda’s apartment—Lucas carrying Claire—was to let her sleep, even though she’d probably be very wet in the morning.

“Should I take the snowsuit off?” Lucas asked Jeanne.

“No, just unzip it so she doesn’t get too hot.” As Lucas headed down the hall to the room that had been his as a child, she called, “But take her shoes off.”

Jeanne and Frieda put their coats away and went to the living room to sit down. When Lucas came back, Frieda offered them a drink, or coffee. She had decaf, she said.

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Jeanne said. “I am stuffed.” Adding perhaps two extra f’s to the word, Frieda thought.

Lucas said he’d have tea, if Frieda had any, so she went into the kitchen to prepare a pot. As she was setting the kettle on the burner, she heard Jeanne say, “How astonishing it is, isn’t it? That Annie should have known your Mr. Pedersen.”

“Mister Young and Easy, as Edith calls him.”

Jeanne laughed, her full, throaty laugh. “Yes.”

She sighed then, and Frieda could imagine her stretching. She was like an animal, it sometimes seemed to Frieda. A large cat. A tiger, even. She thought suddenly of their telephone conversation about Graham’s ashes, of Jeanne’s strength through that. A tiger indeed.

Now she heard Jeanne say, “I wonder if he and Annie might have had a little . . . fling. Whatever.”

“I doubt it,” Lucas said.

“Why would you doubt it?”

Frieda couldn’t hear his reply. The kettle was boiling. She rinsed out the teapot with hot water.

When she came back in to the living room, carrying her tray, Jeanne looked up at her, her wide mouth open in an eager smile. “We would like you to vote, Frieda. Do you think it is possible that Annie had some kind of affair with Lucas’s writer, Mr. Pedersen?”

Frieda set the tray down. “She didn’t, I don’t think.”

Frieda poured out Lucas’s cup and then her own. They watched her.

“Why don’t you think so?”

“I think she would have told me. We’ve been friends for a long time.”

She went over to the chair she usually sat in, next to the purely ornamental wooden mantel, the fireplace closed in with plaster at some point in its past. She set her teacup down on top of a stack of books on the little table there.

“And she would tell you a thing like this?” Jeanne had taken her shoes off. She’d stretched out, and her feet, in their black stockings, rested in Lucas’s lap.

“She has told me lots of things a lot like this. None of them involving her sleeping with someone else.”

“Ah!” Jeanne said.

“Told ya,” Lucas said to her.

After a moment, Jeanne said, “Still, she seemed interested.”

“Well, yes. Even I could see that,” Lucas said.

“Well, maybe interested. But maybe just surprised,” Frieda said.

As if Frieda had said nothing, Jeanne said to Lucas, “Perhaps you should somehow let him know about her. He is divorced, isn’t he?”

“Oh, is he?” Frieda asked.

“Yeah, for the third time, actually,” Lucas said, looking over at her. “A bit of a rake, I think.”

Frieda smiled. “‘And a rambling boy,’” she said.

“What do you mean?” Jeanne asked, frowning.

“Oh, that’s just a song. An old folk song. I think Joan Baez sang it.”

“Oh, of course, I’ve heard of her,” Jeanne said. Then, to Lucas, “But she is too much alone, don’t you think? Annie? Do you think she would be ready to . . . I don’t know. Date someone?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I’m not eager to be the one setting up anything like that.”

“Yes, that would be . . . uncomfortable,” Frieda said.

“Yucky, I would say.” Lucas. This time Frieda laughed—the word that had entered the whole family’s vocabulary now that Claire was talking.

They moved on to other things. A job Jeanne thought she might get, the first one she’d tried for since Claire was born, a bit part in a television soap opera. “I’m wicked in this role—evil, evil, evil. And the proof of this is that I speak with a French accent. It wasn’t supposed to be that way—I was supposed to be American, and I read for the part with an American accent—but when I spoke in my normal way, with my own accent, they were wild with excitement. Much better, to have the bad person be from France.”

“Well, of course,” Lucas said.

Then he talked, about the possibility of a change in his own life. He told Frieda that he didn’t see how they could manage in New York on his salary with all that would be coming at them—Claire and school and within a year or two, surely a new, larger apartment. He said that he was thinking of becoming a literary agent, that he’d spoken to one of the agents he admired, who’d encouraged him.

Frieda listened and commented. Yes, how funny about the soaper part! Yes, yes, she understood the financial strain of life in New York.

But while she was talking, making herself so agreeable, she thought about those subjects, and then all the other subjects everyone had raised at dinner, all the things that everyone had talked about these last few days, and the way they never centered on her.

She would have liked to talk, of course. About her life. About how torn she was at the thought of retiring. How would she spend the days? When would she see the colleagues who had become friends, most of whom lived in the little towns west of Boston, closer to the school? And then, should she sell the apartment, maybe move to someplace cheaper? Arlington? Somerville?

Sitting in the dark in her bedroom after they’d all said good night, waiting for Jeanne and Lucas to be finished in the bathroom, she thought of what they’d just been talking about—Annie, their concern for her. Of course it was because Annie was newly alone, Frieda knew that. But still . . .

She thought of that, she thought of all the other subjects everyone had talked about these last few days, and the way they never focused on her.

She had felt a kind of invisibility today, that was it. First at the party, and now here at home with Jeanne and Lucas. She thought about how differently the day would have gone if Graham had been here.

She missed him. She missed his cry of pleasure when he saw her. “Ah, Frieda! The first Mrs. McFarlane,” he’d say when she arrived at a holiday dinner. And then, holding her hands, smiling at her, “How did I ever let you go?”

And she would answer, “You had no say in the matter,” and he would throw his head back and laugh.

She thought again of the way he’d kept her in his life. The questions he always had for her. About her father, who’d lived well into his nineties. About her piano lessons. About the books she was reading, about her teaching. About what she’d heard from Lucas.

He knew her as no one else did, she thought. She had relied on that. On him.

Too much, too much, she saw now. She’d gone on loving him for too long. He had been too important for her—she hadn’t tried, really, to have another life, focused somewhere else.

Now she was remembering something he’d said at a party one night—she couldn’t recall where, or how long ago. He was talking to someone—Aaron Lambert, she thought it was—about how impossible it would be for him ever to move away from Cambridge. He’d listed his reasons. The store, she remembered. “I hope I’ll be standing at the register, book in hand, and just keel over one day.” The house, which he loved and would never leave voluntarily. He’d mentioned a few other things. Then, “My two children, of course.” Followed quickly by, “My two wives.”

Everyone had burst into laughter. Annie and Frieda had laughed too. At the way he’d exposed himself, she supposed.

Graham had blushed, she remembered that now. In embarrassment? In shame? But then he had laughed too, at himself.