She pulled her head back to see him. “We’re hardly paired,” she said, looking into his eyes.
His face changed. “Ah! Good news.” He smiled down at her, and they relaxed into the noise. Annie wanted him to touch her, she realized. She was waiting for it, her body was waiting.
Then, leaning forward again, he asked, “May I walk you home?”
“Now?” Annie pulled back again, laughing. She raised an open hand to indicate the people pressed in against them. The party was at full tilt, louder, bigger, more lubricated than it had been all evening.
He looked around, as if only now taking in all the people. “Oh!” he said. “Yeah. Later, I suppose, would be better.”
“But see, the thing is, I’m leaving with the one what brought me.” Though she was feeling some regret about that.
They looked at each other. It struck Annie that they were commiserating. Graham was nodding, over and over, as if taking in terrible news. “Well, I like to hear that,” he said at last. “It speaks well of you, I suppose. But also . . .”—he made a rueful face—“also I don’t like to hear it.”
When she left a while later, with Jeff, Annie turned at the door to look for Graham. She found him—he was so tall, so prepossessing, that he was easy to spot. She waved, and he seemed to take a step in her direction, but then someone in the group standing with him must have said something to him, and he turned back, away from her.
She lay awake that night. She kept thinking about Graham—his apparent joyfulness, his ease, the feeling of his rumbling voice in her ear. Even his size. How tall was he? she wondered. Six-three? Six-four? More than a foot taller than she was, certainly. Ridiculous, really.
And he was so big. She’d never been attracted to a fat man before.
But no, she thought. He wasn’t really fat. He was barrel-chested, large, yes. But somehow the way he carried himself—and of course, also his quick appreciation of her—had canceled out that notion for her. She remembered mostly wanting to touch him, wanting him to touch her. She’d been aware again, in the moments they stood so close to each other, of the wetness between her legs.
Alone in her bed under the skylight, Annie felt it all merge, the by now free-floating sexual alertness that had lingered from her afternoon with Jeff, and her happy encounter with Graham. She might have felt bad about using the sensations she’d had with Jeff to feed her response to another man, but she didn’t. It didn’t seem complicated at all to her—just the necessary way she’d stumbled onto Graham.
He interested her, she thought.
And then: C’mon, how could you even begin to know that? You exchanged about two words.
But he had seemed so open, so without caution or defenses. So sweet, really. So eager—for her, certainly, but also somehow for life, she would have said. In the dark, thinking of him, she was smiling.
The next evening she stopped in at the bookstore. It was miraculously clean. The shelves that had been pushed against the walls the night before were back in place, filling the room. There were comfortable chairs set here and there, floor lamps next to them. Graham was busy behind the long checkout counter in front of the plate-glass window, talking, answering questions, manning the cash register. Annie chose a book almost at random from the fiction section—something by John Gardner—and got in line.
When it was her turn, he looked up and his face changed. “Ah, it’s Annie!” he said, grinning. Then a moment of doubt. He looked worried, suddenly. “Isn’t that it? Annie?” he asked. She nodded, and he smiled again, more slowly. “What are you doing here?”
“This.” She held her book up, and he took it. While he was ringing her up, Annie said, “Also I thought maybe I could walk you home.”
His hands stopped. He looked at her. His face lifted in a way she would become familiar with, a way that meant he was purely happy, a way that would come to mean that she was happy too.
“Well, you’d have to wait,” he said. “I don’t get off till ten.”
“I can wait,” she said.
“Music to my ears,” he said.
And so it began, with Graham.
Annie misunderstood it at first, probably partly because the sex worked so well between them from the start. Happy sex. Seemingly uncomplicated. As soon as they began to sleep together, her worries about it vanished. In bed he moved above her, below her, inside her, as if in an element made for him. Swimming in sex—easily, slowly. More of the same in Annie’s life, but better.
For a while it didn’t occur to her that it would ever be anything more than this. In her dizziness about how well things were going, she didn’t notice the changes in him. In herself. She thought of herself as still sliding through the world in the same way—loose, free, wild. Why not?
It was true that she felt overwhelmed sometimes—by Graham’s size, by his energy, his appetite for people, for music, for food. By his appetite for her. It made her uncomfortable, occasionally. She actually slept with Jeff once again after she’d started with Graham. And with one other man, someone friends introduced her to, a bass player, who made her laugh in bed by remembering for her an early Chekhov story about a double bass and a naked woman. She thought of these adventures, she even explained them to Graham, as the result of a generalized excitement created by her affair with him. It was only looking back on them later that she understood she’d also been using them, using them as a way to resist Graham.
But Graham was persistent, a joyous lover, an enthusiast, and finally Annie gave over to him. How could she not? She’d been waylaid, really—by happiness, by his love for her, and then, more slowly, hers for him. By the end of the fifth month she’d known him, she’d moved into his place on Ware Street, a quick walk for him to the bookstore, for her a short drive to her studio in Somerville.
What she told people at first was that she’d moved because her very informal lease was coming up for renewal and the couple who owned the house that contained her attic apartment were going to raise her rent. But she knew, even before she and Graham spoke openly about it with each other, that a life together had begun. Within the year—actually on the anniversary of the store’s opening (“The two happiest days of my life,” he always said)—they were married.
Annie was happy too. But occasionally through their years together, and in spite of everything that was pleasurable and loving between them, she would feel it again, the sense of his having overtaken her somehow, overwhelmed her.
2
Here’s Graham, awake even earlier than usual this morning, sitting alone in the kitchen in the clean, grayish predawn light. He’s wearing an old cotton bathrobe, faded blue—a nothing color in this light. It’s frayed at the collar and cuffs. Under it, a T-shirt. His bare feet, crossed at the ankle under the table, are unusually slender and high-arched for someone so big. His hands, too, holding his mug, are shapely, the fingers long and tapered, reminders of his life as a thinner young man. Normally his expression is alert, ready to be amused at whatever might happen next. Now, in repose, he looks tired. The air is full of the smell of coffee.
He’s at the expansive table where everyone sits during the dinner parties he and Annie like to throw. Facing him on the other side of the table is a row of tall windows that open out over the backyard, still in shadow at this hour—the leaves of the lilac bushes that line one side of the patio are an almost blackish green.