It had been divided then into what were essentially dark cells, tiny rooms that had depressed him on that walk-through. But what Annie said afterward as they talked about it was that those walls would be as easy to take down as they’d been to put up. That when the towering old pine that leaned over the roof was removed, the light would pour in. That the house was essentially surrounded by open land—all those other people’s backyards. In that era before gardening was chic, most of these yards were overgrown with thick, tall grasses gone to seed—a kind of prairie encircling the house. A prairie, except for Karen’s yard, shockingly lush with the perennials, the roses, the shrubs, that the others would slowly acquire as gentrification took hold.
On the day they moved in, Karen, then middle-aged, a handsome, tall, prematurely white-haired woman with a Brahmin accent, had welcomed them with a jug of the cheap wine they all drank at that time—Almaden or Mateus, something like that—and a strange-tasting pasta casserole she said she’d made herself. When Graham returned the empty dish to her, he asked her what it was, exactly. She told him she’d invented the recipe. “I think what really makes it work, though,” she said in her toney voice, “are the canned plums I always add to it.”
Annie sometimes used this line when she was complimented on a meal. Thinking of this, of her excellent imitation of Karen’s voice and patrician accent, he smiles.
As if on cue, above him, footfalls, and then, a minute later, the rush of water through the pipes: she’s awake. He goes to the coffee machine and with the push of a few buttons, the turn of a valve, makes a cappuccino for her and a second cup for himself.
All this is part of their routine. He gets up first, usually around five. He goes downstairs, he makes his coffee and sits alone with it while he reads the paper—the headlines and maybe an article or two. In the summer, he can watch the sun rising slowly over the houses that back up to his and Annie’s, rising until the tops of the trees in his neighbors’ yards look as if they’ve burst into flame. Usually he enjoys every ritualized part of all this.
Not today.
He brings both cups of coffee up the steep back stairs to their bedroom. When he leans against the bedroom door, it swings open to the dazzling morning light up here. In this light, propped against the pillows on their bed, Annie, in her blue-green kimono.
Maybe because of the light, maybe because of his guilt, maybe because he’s been thinking of Frieda—Frieda, homely and in pain—he sees Annie afresh. Annie, this graceful, delicate woman he’s married to, her wide mouth moving now with pleasure into the smile that transforms her, that thrills him now as much as when he first saw her, thirty years before, at the opening party for the bookstore he still owns.
“My sweet husband,” she says, reaching up with both hands to take the cup he holds out to her.
The bookstore. It had been another part of Graham’s transformation. For years after he quit graduate school—all but dissertation on a doctoral degree in English literature—he taught as an adjunct here and there in the Boston area, finally mostly adult education classes, all the while trying to write his novel. He was slow to give that up, but at some point he saw that he wasn’t going to be able to write a book he’d want to read, or, more important, that he’d want anyone else to read. It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.
As he took stock of himself, he remembered the time when he had worked a part-time job for a year or so in a small bookstore in Harvard Square—gone now—and it seemed to him that he was most happy then, living among books, talking about books. He began to nurture the notion of a bookstore of his own.
So when an uncle of his—the lone success in his mother’s family—died and left him what he described to friends as “a little chunk of change,” he and an older friend, Peter Aiello, who always seemed to have many of those chunks more or less just lying around, bought a storefront on Mount Auburn Street, the plan being that Graham would run the store, with Peter as a silent partner.
On the opening night—of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—Annie walked in with a guy, a guy he’d sent an invitation to for reasons he couldn’t later recall. And in spite of everything that seemed ladylike and elegant about her—her slender dancer’s body, her grave, sober face—she also carried a kind of charge that he felt instantly. He understood it as sexual, yes, and it turned out that was apt—she told him later that she’d been fucking Jeff all that afternoon. But in the moment he imagined it as directed at him, connected to all the changes he’d made and wanted to make in his life, to who he wanted to be; and his impulse was to try to be sure she didn’t somehow slip away.
Now Graham sits down in his chair by the bedroom window and lifts his feet, sets them on the end of the bed.
“What news?” she asks, after she’s had a sip or two of her coffee.
“I don’t know.” He lifts his empty hand. “I didn’t read the paper.”
“What?” Her eyebrows rise in theatrical surprise. “You’re supposed to be my conduit to the wider world.”
“I know, I know. Falling down on the job. But . . .” He shrugs. The sun is warm on his feet. Only now does he realize how cold they were downstairs.
They are quiet awhile. He’s aware again of the racket of the birds. They both drink their coffee. He has a mug with his store’s name on it. Annie has a wide white bowl that was an enormous cup before the handle broke off. She has to raise it to her lips with both hands now.
She lowers it to the worn quilt that covers her lap and looks at him, frowning. She says, “Are you worried about something?”
“No, everything’s fine in my little world.”
“Hmm,” she says, looking steadily at him. “Because you seem a bit . . . preoccupied.”
He can hardly stand it, this solicitude toward him, a solicitude that only compounds his guilt. She knows something is bothering him, which makes him ever more evasive. Which worries her the more.
Don’t, he wants to say. Don’t be concerned. Don’t care about me.
“Just, store stuff,” he says. “Nothing important.”
“Well, what? What store stuff? If I can help . . .”
“No. No, everything’s fine.”
She makes a face—eyebrows lifted skeptically, mouth drawn down. “I guess I have to believe you,” she says. “Thousands wouldn’t.”
He smiles at her. Then, to change the subject, he says, “Karen’s out and about.”
“Is she. Gardening?”
“So to speak. In not exactly gardening togs.”
“Oh dear.”
He nods, first up and down, then—what to do?—side to side. “All that’s missing, really, is the boa.”
She laughs quickly and says, “Shit. Well, I’ll talk to her on my way out, for all the good it’ll do.”
They sit in what he hopes is a comfortable silence. In the early days of their marriage, Graham sometimes climbed back into bed with her after they’d drunk their coffee and they made love, but they’ve mostly given that up in recent years. And on those rare occasions when they start in, as often as not, absent the magic blue pill, Graham winds up “underperforming,” as he calls it. Still, it brings them close again each time, the warm touching, flesh on flesh.