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.
He let one Thursday pass, but then he thought that perhaps it might be awkward socially to see her again if she hadn’t intended it as a joke, if she’d actually been inviting him. Maybe he should go, then. Go, and explain himself. Explain that he’d just been horsing around. Not that he wouldn’t love to, et cetera, et cetera. He didn’t let himself think until later that to ponder going there at all was further horsing around on his part, horsing around with the itch of what had begun to feel like a real possibility. And by then it was too late.
Outside, the shadows have lifted and the birds are launched into the frenzied call-and-response that starts their day. He gets up and comes around the table to the windows. Someone—Annie—has left a sweater on one of the old chairs that sit on the mossy brick patio. Its white is startling against the other, muted tones.
He had misunderstood Rosemary, he knows that now. With the quick turn she’d made on his playful tone, she had seemed to him worldly-wise, sexually sophisticated. After the first time they had sex, he tried to make a light remark about this, about how they had stumbled into bed with each other by accident, each of them joking, neither of them getting the other’s joke.
“I don’t see it that way,” she said.
Suddenly he felt a little short of breath. “Oh,” he said. Her face after sex was pinkish—almost chapped-looking. They were still in bed, in her grand bedroom. Even up here there was an expensive-looking kilim on the floor.
“I don’t see it as an accident at all,” she said.
“You don’t.”
“No, I think it was inevitable.”
He didn’t know what to say to this, or even how to take it; but slowly, over the next few times they were together, he began to understand her, to see that she was, if anything, absurdly romantic. Certainly not jaded, or even sophisticated. She was lonely. In need. This made him feel sorry for her, but it also frightened him.
Ah!—his attention is drawn now by the appearance on her back porch of his elderly neighbor, Karen. She pauses there for a moment, her head tilted back, maybe to smell the morning air. Then she laboriously descends the stairs and begins to survey her garden. She’s dressed in one of what Graham thinks of as her “outfits”—in this case a wide-brimmed straw hat, a knee-length white nightgown, and tube socks. She has bright blue sneakers on her feet. There’s something jagged-looking and silvery on these sneakers—maybe lightning bolts? They glint every now and then as she moves around.
He watches her stand for a few moments in front of various plants, her hands on her hips, as though she were chastising them. Occasionally she bends over to painfully, slowly, pull a weed. Her old cat trails her. Sam, orange with white patches. He twines around her legs when she stands still, his tail lightly whipping her mottled shins.
Graham and Annie are worried about Karen. What were once charming eccentricities have ripened, he would say, into more troubling behavior. She seems addled sometimes. Only a few days earlier he found her in the house when he came home from work, standing irresolutely, frowning, in the middle of his living room.
“What are you doing here?” she’d said sharply to him.
“I might ask you the same question,” he said. “But I won’t.” She laughed then—gaily, it seemed to him—and headed toward the back door.
He thinks now of how strange it is that she should be so much in their lives. More than their own parents ever were—certainly more than his, anyway. And this purely the result of the accident of buying the house next door to hers all those years ago.
Standing at the window, he remembers walking with Annie behind the real estate agent through the dim rooms of the house. Annie, small and slender ahead of him, her dark hair still long then, a thick ribbon down her back, her carriage elegant. The graceful accommodating dancer’s turn to whatever the agent was pointing out.
They’d been house-hunting for a while, feeling more and more discouraged as they slowly discovered how limited their choices were going to be. This, the house they were looking at—the house they ended up buying—was a converted coach house. You walked up a long driveway at the side of the much larger, real house, as he thought of it, to get there.