The newspaper, most likely containing the report of what the newly anointed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said or done the day before, is laid out in front of him, but he’s not reading it as he usually does. Instead, he’s remembering his first wife, Frieda. Remembering the day she left him: the chilly morning, homely Frieda in her old tweed coat, trying to hold back her tears as she carried Lucas out to the car. Just thinking of it makes him almost physically uncomfortable, even after all these years. He takes an audible, openmouthed breath and shifts his weight in the chair.
Their apartment then, his and Frieda’s, was on the second floor of a sagging frame house on Windsor Street in Cambridge. He was standing on the brick sidewalk in front of it with nothing to do at this point but watch her, having already hauled down the last of the things she had wanted to take—a carton of her books, a carton of toys for Lucas. The trunk of the car, an old blue Ford Fiesta pocked with rust, was held almost shut with the bungee cords he had stretched over the many other boxes and suitcases she was taking. As she bent to settle Lucas into the back seat, Graham could see the tears glistening on her cheeks.
“Mumma’s owie?” he heard the little boy ask. His small, pretty face, looking up at her, was frightened.
“A tiny one,” Frieda said, trying to smile. “Just tiny.” She pushed at her cheeks with her palms. “I’ll be okay in . . . three minutes.”
She’d turned then, and come to stand in front of Graham. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes behind her glasses were swollen, the wet lashes spiked darkly together.
“No,” he answered.
No, because it was he who had wrecked things. No. Because it was he who was sorry.
Sorry in every sense of the word, he thinks now, in his comfortable kitchen. A sorry bastard. My fault.
Mea culpa.
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.