He’s thinking of this when she says, “What are you up to today?”
He smiles at her. “More of same, of course. Ever more of same. But I think I’ll stay home this morning. Work at my desk here.” Then he remembers. “Oh, and I’m having lunch with John.” His oldest friend, from college.
“John Norris?” Her voice has a surprised pleasure in it, her smile changes her sober face.
“Yeah. Didn’t I mention it?” She shakes her head. “He’s in town for some conference, I think at MIT, so he’s making time for me today.”
“But how nice. Maybe he can cheer you up.” He doesn’t answer her. After a moment, she says, “How long will he be around?”
“I’m not sure. He might have told me, but I don’t remember.”
“Why don’t you ask him for dinner tomorrow, then? If he can. One extra person would be nice. Balance out the boy-girl thing. And I’d love to see him.”
This is the dinner party they’re having the next night—Friday—to celebrate Jamie Slattery’s reading at the bookstore from her new book, an apocalyptic novel set in a fictional New Orleans after a flood more devastating than Katrina.
Jamie is an old friend, but old friend or not, they often have parties for the writers who read at the store. He and Annie are known for these parties—for the meals Annie cooks, for the free-flowing wine, for the talk. In the old days, for the dancing too. It was only a few years ago that Graham finally threw out the stack of 45s he’d held on to for years, most of them so scratched or spilled on that they were unplayable anyway. He still misses them. At odd times he’ll think of one of them—Shirley and Lee doing “Let the Good Times Roll” or James Carr singing “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man”—and he’ll feel a pang of regret—yes, for the loss of the music, but more for those gone-by times. They mostly don’t dance anymore either.
He and Annie talk now about the various people who are coming tomorrow, they exchange what each knows about what’s been happening recently in one or the other of their friends’ lives, and for these moments, everything seems the same to Graham, he can almost forget his anxiety, his sense that he deserves to lose all of this.
Then she says, “You’re staying home more than usual these mornings.”
“Well, I can get more done here, really. And then I’ve been doing that late-afternoon, early-evening shift at the store.”
“I know,” she says. After a moment, “You like that better?”
“I do. I do in some ways. It’s a big rush right after everybody gets out of work, but then it quiets down and you can actually talk to people.” This is all true, but also there’s the problem of Rosemary calling him at the store in the morning.
“Ah, the house specialty,” Annie says. “Talk. And more talk.”
“I suppose,” he says.
“I miss you here when I get home, though. The house feels lonely.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re not avoiding me, are you?”
He reaches over to touch the tented shape of her feet under the quilt. “Hardly.” Though that may be part of it too, he supposes. He looks over at her. She’s lifted the cup to drink, and he can see only her dark brown eyes, steady on him above its rim.
“What are you up to?” he asks.
She groans and rests the cup again on her outstretched legs. “Packing up,” she says. “Getting ready to take the stuff over to Danielle’s. My bubble-wrap day.”
Annie is a photographer, and she has a show coming up at a gallery in the South End. It’s a big deal for her. She hasn’t had a solo show in almost five years.
And he forgot. Fucker that he is. He forgot all about it. He feels a sudden deeper remorse: he was so lost in his own shit that he forgot her life, going on around his. Her life, having to do with what she makes and then puts out into the world, with all that’s fraught about that for her—even more so now because of the long pause that’s preceded this show.
“Ah,” he says. “Well, if you need help, you know where I am.”
“Most of the time I do,” she says, and smiles.
He knows that she’s teasing, but it startles him anyway. He hopes that doesn’t show in his face.
He can hear Annie’s voice rising and falling softly while she’s taking her shower: she often talks to herself. As he passes the old bathroom door on the way to his office, she distinctly says, “Yikes!” and then something else he can’t hear.
It seems to him that these private conversations must be a bit like dreaming for her, but a kind of dreaming more closely based on the concerns of her daily life than would occur at night. Once he heard her say, “I should just shoot the guy,” and thought for a moment that she was talking about him, about something he’d done that had made her angry. But then it occurred to him that she was probably thinking about someone she wanted to take a picture of, and he laughed.
His office is at the front of the house. It’s a small room with a single window that looks out over the long driveway belonging to their neighbors in the real house—the driveway that is also essentially the walkway from the street to their own front door. He starts to neaten up his desk, which is, as always, heaped with books and papers and spreadsheets, printouts of reviews, schedules of upcoming readings at his store and others’. He has two of Jamie’s earlier books stacked next to his computer. He’s reread them quickly in preparation for writing her introduction—he always introduces the writers who come to the store, unless there’s a special reason for someone else to do it. Several drafts of that introduction are lying on top of everything else. When he’s made what seems to him like orderly piles of most of the stuff, he looks over the last version he’s done of the intro and starts to tinker with it—partly because it needs work, but partly also to look busy when Annie comes to say goodbye.
And here she is, standing in the doorway in jeans and sandals and a white linen shirt, her wet hair pinned up at the back of her head. “I’m off,” she says.
“You look ravishing.”
“Mmm. Thanks. Maybe you could ravish me sometime.” She comes into the room and bends over him, tugging lightly at his beard. His secret weapon, she calls it. She’s told him often how much she loves its soft touch on her thighs, her cunt.
He’s enveloped in her smell—soap, perfume, something clean and bleachy from her clothes. “I’ll ponder it,” he says.
“Ahh! Nothing like ponderous sex, is there?” she says, and laughs. She kisses him lightly and turns to leave the room. He hears her pause partway down the stairs. She calls back, “Late dinner tonight, then?”
“Yes,” he says.
The front door slams, and he’s alone again. He’s relieved to be alone, he realizes. Pathetic.
As he edits the introduction, he’s also intermittently thinking of Annie, of their earliest lovemaking. Of her body, of what they did with each other, of where they did it—her apartment, sunstruck and hot in the attic of a huge house on Avon Hill, the scudding clouds visible above her in the skylight as she rode him slowly. In his car at night in the dark parking lot behind some long-gone jazz club in Central Square, stopping, holding still when someone passed close by. Images like this have come to him often in the last few weeks, mostly, he thinks, as a way to make a distance between himself and Rosemary—reminding himself of those days when everything about Annie, too, was new, when everything they did with each other seemed a way they were claiming each other. For him, that he was owning this part of her, and this, and now this.